If this happened in Europe, we would say that it is a simple case of municipal segregation, the story of a neighborhood that wants to separate itself from the city to which it belongs. In the United States, the expression segregate has more sinister connotations, which is why the press is not using it. Buckhead is a residential and financial district with 80% white citizens, while Atlanta, capital of the State of Georgia, has 47.5% African-American residents and 10.2% Latinos and Asians. The average income per capita in the city is 35,453 dollars per year (about 31,000 euros), with an exclusion rate of 22%. Buckhead reaches 81,000 dollars (about 71,000 euros), which places it among the 50 richest communities in the US.
For Mark E., a 53-year-old graphic designer who has lived in Atlanta for several decades: “Behind the municipal separatism so fashionable in recent months in Buckhead is the selfishness of a wealthy neighborhood that no longer wants to contribute its taxes to the development of a poor city with serious structural deficiencies”. Bill White, president and spokesman for the neighborhood platform Buckhead City Committee, declared in January to CNN that what the residents of this opulent neighborhood of 78,000 inhabitants want is to recover the independence they lost in 1952, the date on which several neighboring municipalities were absorbed by the main city of the State: “Buckhead has never been part of Atlanta”, explained White, “it has always had a differentiated identity, but we have tried to live in harmony with the rest of the districts of the city until the cynicism and incompetence of the Mayor Andre Dickens have made it impossible.”
Dickens is especially criticized for the increase in crime rates that the city has experienced in the last two years. But in the opinion of Mark E., the insistence on citizen security problems would be nothing more than “a somewhat crude pretext to generate adhesions and not recognize the sad reality: that the residents of Buckhead want to disconnect from Atlanta for economic, racial reasons and prestigious”.
Mark E., who has spent long periods in Spain, draws a parallel: “It is as if the northern neighborhoods of Castellana were separated from Madrid or those in the upper part of Diagonal broke with Barcelona, the impact on municipal budgets It would be brutal.” In the case of Buckhead, the divorce would mean for Atlanta the loss of 20% of its population and 55% of the resources of its local government. “A disaster”, as recognized, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal, the university professor Volkan Topalli, who lives in Buckhead, but is against the separation. Topalli became, despite himself, a symbol of the alleged grievances suffered by the white minority in Atlanta.
In the spring of 2021, he was shot in the biceps while walking around the university where he teaches, Georgia State. Representatives of the Buckhead City Committee affirmed that Topalli was one more victim of the “spiral of barbarism”. The academic disagrees: “Problems like the one I had to suffer are not resolved with a simple administrative act. Even if Buckhead were to break away from Atlanta, the city, with its problems, would still be there, with far fewer resources to solve them satisfactorily. Unless the next step is to build a wall that separates the wealthy neighborhoods from the less so. But if that doesn’t work between nations, how can you expect it to work between municipalities?
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